Golden Years Elusive For Black Men

Faces in the crowd - Profiles of Central Florida's increasingly diverse people - their lifestyles, hopes, fears, challenges and successes.

Pushing Retirement To 70 To Save On Social Security Threatens Black Males, Who On Average Live To 65.

March 31, 1996|By Jeff Kunerth of The Sentinel Staff

Kelvin Byrd drives home beneath a cloudy night sky the color of lint. A storm is on the way. He pulls into the parking lot of the Summerset Apartments in south Orlando and climbs the stairs to his second-floor apartment, toting a plastic grocery sack.

The light beside the door is burned out. The paint on the door is chipped. He slips the key in the lock. Inside, the apartment is quiet. It's 9:15 p.m.

His girlfriend, expecting their first child in August, is asleep. Byrd pulls a six-pack of Olde English 800 malt liquor from the sack, liberates one of the tallboys and slips the rest in the refrigerator.

He has spent the day in the kitchen of the Renaissance Resort Hotel making sauces: a red pepper sauce, a white wine with mushrooms sauce, alfredo and marinara sauces. He cooked red cabbage and yellow rice. He ladled the red wine sauce onto filet mignon and the red pepper sauce onto broiled salmon on 120 plates of surf-and-turf for a convention of disabled veterans.

''I like it when it's really busy. You don't have time to think; you just react,'' says Byrd, who makes $9 an hour after seven years as a cook in the hotel's main kitchen.

He talks about cooking as though food is art and chemistry combined: ''It's challenging to get all that stuff to work together to form a particular flavor you are looking for.''

People live longer, so why retire at 65?

Byrd is 31 and has never been unemployed. He has worked now for more than half his life, starting at age 14 with a $2-an-hour job assembling trophies. His first kitchen job was washing dishes and busing tables at 16. He studied computers in junior college but has fixed his future on food.

''I love to cook. I love to eat,'' he says.

Life is perilous for black men like Kelvin Byrd. Some of the friends he grew up with in Lake Charles, La., are in jail. Others are dead. Car accidents. Shootings. Drownings.

At 21, he got a close look at his own mortality when a hot-tempered girlfriend pulled a gun on him at a party.

''She was wanting to go home and I wasn't. She shot at me, missed and hit a tree,'' he says. ''I guess she was serious about leaving.''

Black men like Byrd have slightly better than a 50-percent chance of living to the age of 65. For his five sisters, the odds are much better: Three out of four black females will reach 65, about the same as white males. More than 86 percent of all white females will reach retirement age and then live another 19 years on the average.

Because of the lower life expectancy for black men, proposals to raise the retirement age of Social Security could mean guys like Byrd might work until they die. Social Security's retirement age is already inching upward. By the time the baby boomers start retiring, the age for Social Security will be 67.

There are proposals to move the retirement age to 70, even 72. Budget-minded members of Congress argue that when the retirement age of 65 was first introduced by Germany's Otto von Bismarck in 1884 - to care for the very old - life expectancy at birth was 37 years. Today, it's 76. People are living longer, they say, so there's no reason to stop working at 65.

But while eight out of 10 white women reach age 70, fewer than half of all black males do. About two-thirds of black women and white men will make it to 70.

Proponents of extending the retirement age argue that it will preserve the solvency of the Social Security system by keeping taxpayers in the workforce longer and reducing retirement expenditures.

Opponents contend that it's a backdoor attempt to reduce benefits. A large segment of the population will not continue working until 70, they argue, but will retire early and thus receive reduced Social Security checks - just as they do now when they retire before age 65. The proposals for raising the retirement age do not include raising the Social Security age for early retirement from the current 62.

Myopia of youth: Retirement is far away

Those with the most physically demanding jobs will be the least able to continue working to age 70. And many of those are in occupations - construction, farming, landscaping - that are not covered by pensions or company retirement plans.

Moving the retirement age to 70 penalizes those who can least afford it: black men working in physically demanding jobs with no retirement income except Social Security, argue opponents such as the American Association of Retired Persons.

''Moving the retirement age to 70 might work for white-collar workers,'' says Eugene I. Lehrmann, AARP president. ''But for those who do a lot of heavy physical work, you are condemning them to lower benefits because they can't work that long.''

Kelvin Byrd's father, a butcher, lived to be 82. But without a company retirement plan, he continued working until felled by illness in his mid-70s. That is the fate of most people, black men in particular, who have no retirement income except Social Security, says Hal Sheppard, a gerontologist at the University of South Florida.